Scan
Point your phone at any barcode. The digits become a creature, the same one for everyone, forever.
Scanlings™
Scan a barcode. Get a creature.
The same packet gives the same creature on every phone, forever.
Free. No account needed.
What you do in Scanlings
Your creatures are only the start. Here is what you do with them.
Dress your Keeper
Some barcodes hold something to wear instead. Your Keeper wears it, and what your Keeper wears makes your creatures stronger.
Train
Spar with the Instructor on the beach. Every fight earns your Keeper experience: levels open new slots to wear things in, and after the last slot, make everything you wear work harder.
Grow a village
Put your creatures to work at the mine, the lake and the forge, and raise buildings that each open something new. The archaeologist lives there, reading the bosses' secrets off old stones.
The weekly boss
Once a week a boss comes. Send your best five; it pays gold, experience and Sunstone shards, and the village runs on shards.
The monthly boss
Once a month something far bigger arrives, and every player fights it at once, for five hours. It cannot be killed, only driven off. Materials from your village help uncover what it is.
The tower
Climb it floor by floor. Every ten floors it asks for different creatures, so it tests your whole collection, not just your best five.
Compete
Hold a title until somebody takes it from you, climb the leaderboards, and unlock every achievement you can.
How it works
- Point your phone at a barcode. Anything — a pasta packet, a tin, a bottle of shampoo, something on a shelf in a shop you are walking through.
- The digits become a creature. Its body, its colours, its pattern, its stats and its name all come out of the number. Nothing is rolled twice.
- It is yours, and it is the same for everyone. That packet gives the same creature to you, to your friend, and to a stranger in another country — today and in ten years.
Found so far
—
distinct creatures discovered by players, out of roughly a trillion barcodes in the world.
This is a beta, and here is what that means
- Your creatures will change. We are still drawing bodies, heads and limbs. When new art lands, some creatures are re-rolled and yours may end up looking different. We will say so, in the app, before it happens.
- Balance will move. Stats, rarity and battle numbers are being tuned. Nothing is final until battles have actually been played.
- Nothing you find is lost. Your scans are saved and backed up. First discoveries stay yours permanently, even if the creature's picture changes.
- It is free, and it stays free to play. No ads, and no timers you can pay to skip. Everything in the game is found by scanning or bought with gold you earned playing, and there is no way to pay your way past anybody: the only things for sale are packs of looks and music, which never win a fight, and never gold.
What is coming
Now
Playable today
- Scanning and collecting — the core loop, live
- Offline scanning — eggs that hatch when you reconnect
- Four creature families — biped, quad, round and winged
- Sparring — a team of five, fought with nothing to lose
- Leaderboards — opt-in, by your name or anonymously, with your place either way
- Titles — held by whoever currently leads, and taken the day somebody passes them
- Achievements — over three hundred badges: every body, skin, marking and eye the game can make, the village and the weekly bosses
- Something to earn by fighting — so a win is worth having
- Offline sparring — the Instructor travels with you
- Something else in small barcodes — items, worn by your Keeper, found the same way as everything else
- The tower — something to climb between events
- Somewhere to spend what you find — stocked by players, not by us
- A weekly boss — once a week, one of eight, for you alone
- Sound and music — every effect made from numbers, and eight tracks for the menus
- A village — somewhere your creatures stay, and get on with things while you are elsewhere
- Expeditions — teams sent out from the village, coming back with what they found
- An app on Google Play — on the store, the same game and the same hero
- A monthly boss — one for everybody at once
- Boards and badges for the monthly boss — who took most of it, and who gave most to the monolith
- Attacks that move — every element's shot forms, turns and flies with a trail
- Cosmetics — death markers, hit styles and music: free looks for everyone, and packs to buy
- Your Keeper, dressed — wearing what you equip, with the face and hair you choose
- Notifications on your phone — the reminders you choose, even with the game closed
- Friends — a QR beside you or a link far away, then visit their collection and their Keeper, spar their team and trade creatures
Next
Being built
- An all-time board for the monthly boss — once it has come a few times
Later
Designed, not started
- Serpentine creatures — a fifth family
Drawn by hand
Every body, head, leg and tail is drawn on a fixed grid at a fixed palette, one pixel at a time. No AI-generated art, anywhere. Creatures are assembled from those parts, so one new head changes thousands of them at once.
Over a billion different-looking creatures are possible today, and the number grows every time something new is drawn. You can play at two levels of detail, too — the small ones above are the same creatures at the chunkier setting.
What we store
A name you choose, the barcodes you scan, and what you do in the game. The privacy page has the whole list.
We do not store your email or your real name, and the private notes you write on a creature never leave your phone. Nothing is sold or shared, and there are no trackers or ads.
What a barcode actually is
A number, printed as stripes so a machine can read it. Almost every product in the world carries one, and it is unique to that product — which is the whole reason this game can promise you the same creature every time.
There are a few kinds. Scanlings reads the three you will actually meet, and you can try all of them right here.
Reading this on your phone? These are for scanning off another screen — open the page on a computer, or just go and find a real packet.